3. More Opportunities to Convert. Every post you make on a social media platform is an opportunity for customers to convert. When you build a following, you’ll simultaneously have access to new customers, recent customers, and old customers, and you’ll be able to interact with all of them. Every blog post, image, video, or comment you share is a chance for someone to react, and every reaction could lead to a site visit, and eventually a conversion. Not every interaction with your brand results in a conversion, but every positive interaction increases the likelihood of an eventual conversion. Even if your click-through rates are low, the sheer number of opportunities you have on social media is significant. And as I pointed out in my article, “The Four Elements of Any Action, And How To Use Them In Your Online Marketing Initiative,” “opportunity” is the first element of any action.

Standard to any business or marketing plan is the SWOT analysis. The SWOT analysis should help you clearly define your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats so that you can develop goals and objectives that are on point and tied to your overall mission. The SWOT analysis will also enable you to understand what differentiates you from your competition and how you should position yourself in the market. It will also help in developing your messaging and your unique selling proposition. Brutal honesty is imperative to a truly insightful SWOT. Use bullets and aim for 4–5 in each section. Limiting your lists will help you to focus on the most critical points and help retain focus.

Because it appeared quickly, social media has developed a reputation by some for being a passing marketing interest, and therefore, an unprofitable one. The statistics, however, illustrate a different picture. According to Hubspot, 92% of marketers in 2014 claimed that social media marketing was important for their business, with 80% indicating their efforts increased traffic to their websites. And according to Social Media Examiner, 97% of marketers are currently participating in social media—but 85% of participants aren’t sure what social media tools are the best to use.
"Jim, Wanted to touch base with you on an update. We should have a better understanding when were starting back up in the next 2-4 weeks. Good news is that it looks like your link building efforts are paying off like we talked about. Over the past 2 days our free google traffic has seen new highs. So we were on a steady down trend for 5 months and over the past 2 weeks we have seen a steady increase to new highs of over that of last summer." Andrew G.
For example, what are the quality and quantity of the links that have been created over time? Are they natural and organic links stemming from relevant and high quality content, or are they spammy links, unnatural links or coming from bad link neighborhoods? Are all the links coming from the same few websites over time or is there a healthy amount of global IP diversification in the links?
Will my target audience realistically spend this amount for the product? Again, your reputation is on the line here. Is the product you are thinking of promoting priced reasonably for your audience? When I was writing my ebook, I was stuck on pricing. I asked around for opinions. A number of people suggested I price my ebook at $47! Their idea was to price according to value, not size. In my mind that was crazy. My network was composed of a lot of stay-at-home bloggers, and my collective audience was comprised mostly of people without a whole lot of disposable income. There was no way anyone was going to pay $47 for my 30-page ebook.
Affiliate marketing is the art of marketing products, services or information for others. It doesn't require that you ever house or warehouse a single thing. But it does require that you have an audience to market those things to online. Without that audience, whether it's through search engines like Google or social media channels like Facebook, you'll find a difficult time with affiliate marketing.
The best evidence that social marketing is effective comes from studies of mass communication campaigns. The lessons learned from these campaigns can be applied to other modes of communication, such as communication mediated by healthcare providers and interpersonal communication (for example, mass nutrition messages can be used in interactions between doctors and patients).
"You and the team at Internet Marketing Ninjas have been great, demonstrating the quality of your work through useful recommendations, reports and top-notch content that has won us some great links. Thank you. In turn, I trust that we have been good clients over the past few months offering no hassles, no payment issues, quick implementation of content and good communication throughout our engagements. We plan on continuing to work with you for quite sometime." Sara C.
2. Improved brand loyalty. According to a report published by Texas Tech University, brands who engage on social media channels enjoy higher loyalty from their customers. The report concludes “Companies should take advantage of the tools social media gives them when it comes to connecting with their audience. A strategic and open social media plan could prove influential in morphing consumers into being brand loyal.” Another study published by Convince&Convert found that 53% of Americans who follow brands in social are more loyal to those brands.
Identify the barriers to change: through interviews, surveys, focus groups or other methods, you'll want to find out what makes it difficult or unattractive for people to make these changes. Do pregnant women feel uncomfortable at the area clinic, or are they made to feel stupid when they talk to the doctor? Is the clinic too far away? Can they not take the time away from their jobs?

When Shane Snow started promoting his new book Dream Team, he knew he had to leverage a data-driven content strategy framework. So he chose his favorite one: the content strategy waterfall, which is defined by Economic Times as a model used to create a system with a linear and sequential approach. To get a better idea of what this means, take a look at the diagram below:

There are two ways to approach affiliate marketing: You can offer an affiliate program to others or you can sign up to be another business's affiliate. As the business driving an affiliate program, you'll pay your affiliates a commission fee for every lead or sale they drive to your website. Your main goal should be to find affiliates who'll reach untapped markets. For example, a company with an e-zine may make a good affiliate because its subscribers are hungry for resources. So introducing your offer through a "trusted" company can grab the attention of prospects you might not have otherwise reached.
Knowing these big goals will also facilitate backing out the math. How much marketing will be needed to get to your biggest goals? You probably don’t have the budget to achieve that on day one. So, break it up into milestones, and identify the marketing needed to get you to each marker on the journey. One of the first will be hitting that crucial breakeven point, and paying your founding team enough to be able to afford to stay in business, and enjoy it.
When writing this guide, we reached out to the marketer community to collect case studies and learnings about creative marketing strategies. Most of these examples are included throughout the guide, but some didn’t quite fit. So we included those loose ends here, from the perspective of four awesome marketers. What better way to wrap up this guide than with you, our community?
For public sector agencies, social marketing is often used as a way to encourage people to follow rules and regulations, and practice general safe behaviors. For example, police departments campaign with slogans such as “Buckle up for life” and “Click it or ticket” to encourage people to wear their seat belts—showing either the positive rewards for this action (saving lives) or the negative consequences for ignoring the law (getting a traffic ticket).
If you're interested in a simple solution that allows you to reach customers primarily through email, iContact is our top pick for email marketing tools. This is a straightforward, easy-to-use product that focuses solely on email marketing, marketing automation and the ability to segment your audiences based upon how they found you (Google versus Facebook, for example). On top of that, there's a thorough help center and quality customer support.
Focus on reviewing products that fall within your niche. Then, leveraging the rapport you have created with your audience and your stance as an expert, tell your readers why they would benefit from purchasing the product you are promoting. It is especially effective to compare this product to others in the same category. Most importantly, make sure you are generating detailed, articulate content to improve conversions.
Affiliate marketing is an ideal solution for those looking to gain control of their own income by focusing on performance-based revenue options. Working in tandem with a seller, a motivated affiliate marketer will be able to achieve a passive income from the comfort of their home without worrying about producing their own product or service. Although the success of the job does depend on the affiliate’s marketing skills, it can prove to be an effective way to meet your income goals as either a primary career or a profitable second job.
In 2004 in the US teens spent $105 billion and influenced another $48 billion. In 1998 US companies spent $200 billion on advertising. Teens are exposed to 3000 ads a day. Eighty three percent of teens reported going online in 2004.14 Teens are a priority market for commercial marketing in America today, and tens of millions of dollars are invested in teen research. Here are some of the beliefs about teens that emerge from that experience.
Awesome article! This is jam packed with great info. I am just starting a personal finance blog with my fiance and we were a little confused about how to start monetizing. We were initially thinking about using Google AdSense but between this post and another blog I read I am surely convinced that’s not the correct route. I’m really happy you have shared this information because it’s provided an excellent starting point for creating income.
Using influencers to market your products or services is a great way to quickly saturate yourself into the marketplace, no matter what you're peddling. However, finding the right influencer at the right price is the hard part. You don't necessarily have to go to the top-tier influencers; you can also opt for micro-influencers (those that have 10,000 to 100,000 followers or fans).

There are a few social behaviors, such as using a seat belt, that remain constant over a long period of time, that are easy to execute, and that become part of the driving experience. These can be said to be sustainable, as long as a dramatic new event does not occur. Remember we once thought that breast self‐examination was the best way for women to detect breast cancer early; then our science changed. In social marketing the cost of marketing has to be built into the cost of programs. The level of marketing costs often varies over the lifetime of a behavior or product. Launch and introduction are often the most expensive, maintenance can cost less, and reviving an old idea can cost somewhere in between.

Many advertisers are unaware of the potential of the affiliate marketing business model for their own businesses, in fact, most small businesses have never heard of it. But imagine marketing your products only to interested people for no upfront fee. Paying only when you get results is a risk-free way of advertising that requires no marketing budget to get started. As you can imagine, this is great for any start-up business with little funding for marketing their new brand.
But even beyond this, the way you say things is important. Young people often have a language all their own, and if you are directing a message at them, it should be in their language. Some groups of people tend to be wary of any authority, and won't take kindly to having "expert opinion" thrown in their face; for other groups, this is the only thing they will listen to. You should have already discovered what is important to your audience; use this understanding as you design messages.
1. The Marketing Mix is the primary element that differentiates social marketing from communication and advertising approaches with which it is often confused. When Coca Cola markets a new drink it must first design the product's color, taste, and consistency. It then prices that product to be competitive, places or distributes that product in places where people are most likely to desire it, and then they promote it, using a wide variety of approaches including prizes, events, publicity, advertising, and discounts. In social marketing, however, the product is often the desired behavior itself (“breastfeed your child at work”) and/or some supporting device or policy necessary to make the behavior possible (a breastfeeding room in a modern office complex); price is the embarrassment and time required to breastfeed, while promotion is all the activities the company and coworkers take to reduce the embarrassment and support the behavior.
That type of earth-shattering failure and pain really does a number on a person. Getting clean and overcoming those demons isn't as simple as people make it out to be. You need to have some serious deep-down reasons on why you must succeed at all costs. You have to be able to extricate yourself from the shackles of bad habits that have consumed you during your entire life. And that's precisely what Sharpe did.

Brand awareness has been proven to work with more effectiveness in countries that are high in uncertainty avoidance, also these countries that have uncertainty avoidance; social media marketing works effectively. Yet brands must be careful not to be excessive on the use of this type of marketing, as well as solely relying on it as it may have implications that could negatively harness their image. Brands that represent themselves in an anthropomorphizing manner are more likely to succeed in situations where a brand is marketing to this demographic. "Since social media use can enhance the knowledge of the brand and thus decrease the uncertainty, it is possible that people with high uncertainty avoidance, such as the French, will particularly appreciate the high social media interaction with an anthropomorphized brand." Moreover, digital platform provides an ease to the brand and its customers to interact directly and exchange their motives virtually.[33]

Doing business without a marketing plan is like driving without a map. You may get to your destination—eventually—but you risk making time-consuming and costly errors along the way. You might be assuming there's demand for your product when there isn't, for example. Your services might be priced too low. Or you could be venturing into a market that is impenetrable because of regulatory restrictions.
MoreNiche is one of the few affiliate networks that offer free affiliate training and ongoing personal support in this way. Many people who don’t know about our network currently pay out hundreds, if not thousands of pounds on affiliate training courses, seminars and even personal mentors each year. But they only learn the same information we give away for free once you’re working with us!
When beginning your affiliate marketing career, you’ll want to cultivate an audience that has very specific interests. This allows you to tailor your affiliate campaigns to that niche, increasing the likelihood that you’ll convert. By establishing yourself as an expert in one area instead of promoting a large array of products, you’ll be able to market to the people most likely to buy the product.
The implementation of affiliate marketing on the internet relies heavily on various techniques built into the design of many web-pages and websites, and the use of calls to external domains to track user actions (click tracking, Ad Sense) and to serve up content (advertising) to the user. Most of this activity adds time[citation needed] and is generally a nuisance to the casual web-surfer and is seen as visual clutter.[citation needed] Various countermeasures have evolved over time to prevent or eliminate the appearance of advertising when a web-page is rendered. Third party programs (Ad-Aware, Adblock Plus, Spybot, pop-up blockers, etc.) and particularly, the use of a comprehensive HOSTS file can effectively eliminate the visual clutter and the extra time and bandwidth needed to render many web pages. The use of specific entries in the HOSTS file to block these well-known and persistent marketing and click-tracking domains can also aid in reducing a system's exposure to malware by preventing the content of infected advertising or tracking servers to reach a user's web-browser.[citation needed]